Various kinds of electronic sensing technologies have applied to our daily life to bring in the convenience, especially for sanitary equipment.
For example, in the public places, such as, the toilets in the park, hospital, or station, people share the sanitary equipments, such as, the faucet, the soap dispenser, and the flush button, with others which not only reduces the lifetime of the equipments, but the sanitary conditions becomes worse. Besides, the physical contacts of the users' hands with these public equipments also increase the possibility of infection. Then, by introducing the electronic sensing technology, the modern sanitary equipments in the public places are mostly equipped with infrared sensors, so that, for example, the faucet, the soap dispenser and the flush button, all can be activated by the sensing of the users' hands without physical contacts. Therefore, not only the equipments can prolong their lifetime, the sanitary conditions also can be improved.
Although the electronic sensing technology brings in convenience for the sanitary equipments, it actually might turn up another problem of resource wasting if the design thereof is not good enough, especially for the automatic soap dispenser. Different from the electronic faucet or flush button which is activated as the hand is sensed and stopped as the hand leaves, namely the using time of the user decides the active duration of the equipments, if the automatic soap dispenser employs the same operation mode and stops the soap delivery as sensing the leaving of the user's hand, extra soap might be delivered out and dropped on the platform or the floor, so as to waste the soap and also increase the difficulty in cleaning.
Accordingly, the automatic soap dispenser is usually designed to supply a fixed amount of soap, as disclosed in R.O.C patent No. M328853, entitled “Soap dispensing mechanism for automatic soap dispenser”, R.O.C patent No. M335262, entitled “Soap dispensing structure”, and R.O.C patent No. M345577, entitled “Mechanism for doubling soap dispensing in automatic soap dispenser”. All these disclosures employ a soap dispensing tube, and through compressing the soap dispensing tube, a fixed amount of soap can be outputted. However, a common issue of this kind of structure is that since the soap stored in the soap dispensing tube is not much, every time being triggered, the soap dispenser has to compress the tube several times for outputting a sufficient amount of soap. And, since the user is not aware of the multiple compressions and obviously has difficulty in ascertaining when the soap dispensing will stop, it is natural for the user to move the hand away after the first drop of soap and leave the sequential soap to drop on the platform or the floor. Besides, this kind of automatic soap dispenser always has a special packaging standard and also employs the dedicated soap container and dispensing tube, which limits the application thereof to other living wares, such as, shampoo, shower gel, or lotion.
In view of the drawbacks of the automatic soap dispenser described above, another kind of automatic soap dispenser is developed, as disclosed in R.O.C patent No. 367979, entitled “Vertical reciprocating pressing device”, which can be applied to most containers with a pressing head in the markets, such as, the bottles of hand soap, shampoo, shower gel, or lotion. However, although this kind of soap dispenser can be widely used for various containers, it is disadvantageous that the pressing stroke can not be adjusted. For example, the pressing heads of different manufacturers employ different standards, e.g., for outputting sufficient soap, some are designed to press down a distance of 10 mm˜14 mm, and others are 14 mm˜20 mm. Therefore, as employing this kind of automatic soap disperser, one possibility is the output exceeds the required amount of soap and causes a soap wasting, and another possibility is the output is insufficient, so that the soap dispenser has to be set to press multiple times, and the problem of the unexpected drops of soap raises again.
Therefore, since the conventional soap dispenser with dispensing tube is deficient in insufficient delivering amount and poor compatibility with bottles in the market, and the conventional vertical reciprocating soap dispenser is also deficient in adjusting the pressing stroke and thus the output amount, there still a need to improve the structure of the soap dispenser.